Final Fight is a port of the arcade game of the same name. But unlike the arcade game, you can't just keep pumping quarters into it to brute-force your way through it, you have a finite amount of lives and continues to work with.

But you have a secret weapon.

At the title screen

Hold down the L button and press Start, and you get a hidden Option screen!

You get to adjust all kinds of things here: difficulty, extra lives, frequency of additional lives, there's a sound test to listen to, and you can even turn the 'Extra Joy' on or off.

I like to turn the 'Extra Joy' on.

This one's kind of fun. In Final Fantasy 6 for the SNES (otherwise known as Final Fantasy 3 in North America) there's a couple of bugs that will let you defeat just about any enemy or group of enemies with essentially no effort.

First, get into battle with a party that has Cyan in it. Then have him charge up his SwdTech to level 2 (Retort).

Then, before he has a chance to use it (i.e. before he gets hit with a physical attack) turn him into an Imp.

Then kill him off with a magical attack.

Then revive him.

Now the fun begins.

As soon as a physical attack is made, from anyone to anyone else, Cyan will counter it.

And, because of a couple of bugs, he'll continue to counterattack until every enemy on the screen is dead.

You might run into a problem if an enemy on the screen is invisible or otherwise can't die from physical attacks, so be careful. Once this bug is initiated, you can't do anything else until the battle is over.

On The Ball is a little bit of an oddball game. You have to guide your little marble through the stages by rotating the stage and letting gravity take care of the rest. There's a huge variety of stages (one hundred of 'em!) to keep you busy for a while.

But what if you went to the password screen and put in this sequence of characters?:

You'd be taken back to the title screen, with a snazzy new option!

Pick your round and get on it!

But, be warned, those higher levels are pretty ridiculous.

I mean, they're at the end of the game for a reason, you know.

In the Super NES Mario Paint, you have three pens to work with, each a varying thickness.

But sometimes you just need something a little finer, for detail work.

In that case, you go into the Stamp Editor and create a stamp that's a single pixel of whatever color pen you need.

Then save, exit, and go back to drawing.

You then select the Stamp tool and pick your newly created stamp and drag it around like it's a pen. The result?

Extra fine lines!

Which artists tell me is a Good Thing(tm), so I believe them.

If you play Super Mario Kart enough, you're going to get better, that's pretty much a given. But, what if you get so good at the game that you have nothing left to do? Nothing left to unlock, and the game's just not challenging any more?

Well, you could go to your driver select screen

Then hold Y and press A

Your driver shrinks! Just like he hit a poison mushroom or was hit by lightning. Start the race and:

You retain shrinky status, which means that not only is your top speed lower, but if you get hit by another kart you get flattened and immobilized for a few seconds

You can temporarily cancel the effects by grabbing a poison mushroom, but you'll shrink again when it wears off

How's that for a challenge?

Super Mario World stages are just full of alternate exits, all of which you'll have to find if you want to achieve full completion. (There are 96 exits total to find).

One of them is particularly useful, it leads to something called the Top Secret Area.

Start out by making your way to the Donut Ghost House while you have a Cape

Immediately fly up and toward the left

Follow the path to the right and down toward the door. There's only one way to go. You can grab the 1ups if you want.

Break the tape at the end of the stage and a new path will open to the North of the Ghost House, the Top Secret Area!

This is a really nice little stage. There's a Yoshi and four powerup blocks (two feathers and two fire flowers)

Letting you get prepared for any stage that might be coming up.

And it all resets once you leave, letting you collect everything again.

Remember a while back that I told you how to get lots of 1ups in the original Super Mario Bros.? Turns out that you can pull off a similar feat in its super-hard sequel, too.

At the very beginning of the game you see this thing.

Which houses a hidden mushroom. Hit it from underneath to pop it out of there.

Then get the koopa over on the right-most block and strategically break the rest like so:

Then, wait until the koopa is about halfway off its platform and jump straight down on it. Done right, you'll start bouncing.

And just like before, you'll eventually start racking up the 1ups!

And the best part is that on the Super NES version, the counter actually stops correctly at 127 lives, so there's no danger of going over and losing them all.

And you're going to need every one of those lives, trust me.

All over the populated areas of the Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past you find these chickens.

They don't do much except cluck and run away if you hit them with your sword, so you might get bored and just start hacking away at them. They never run out of health, so you can keep it up for a while, until...

The distressed chicken calls in the cavalry and they swarm the screen! These chickens are invulnerable and dangerous to touch. I just hope you were near a doorway so you can run and hide. If not, the onslaught will stop eventually.

Oh, and this works on the skeleton chickens in the Dark World, too.

Ys III: Wanderers from Ys is one of those games that I played and really liked the music to (bonus pro tip, the game name, "Ys" is pronounced very similar to "Ease"), so wouldn't it be great if you could listen to the music any time you wanted?

Well, then, good news!

First, bring up your menu by hitting Select on controller 1

Then press Select on controller 2

Ta da!

Now you can listen to all the sounds and music that the game has to offer.

And as a bonus, the song you pick will continue to play after you close the menu and until you change areas.

Pretty awesome!

In the original Super Mario Bros. (and its huge number of remakes) you get to slide down a flagpole at the end of each level.

Once you slide down and go into the mini-fort, you might see some fireworks, which give you 500 points each. There might be one, three, six, or zero.

But what triggers it?

Great question!

The amount of fireworks you get is dependent on the last digit of the timer when you hit the flagpole. If the digit it 1, 3, or 6, then that's how many fireworks you get. Anything else nets zero.

I find that the best way to guarantee a 6 is to stand on the top step as far left as you can. Then, when the timer's last digit hits 9, hold B, run and jump onto the flagpole. Then you get the 5,000 points and six fireworks for 3,000 more, which nets you a total of 8,000 points (plus the bonus for whatever's left on the timer).

Not too bad!

Oh, and this tip only works on levels that actually have a flagpole. So it's a no-go in the big castle levels.